Source

The source of vim can be found on the official site here [1]. I downloaded it and unpacked on my /opt/ directory.

tar -jxvf vim-7.2.tar.bz2

Libraries

To be functional, vim need libc and ncurse. NCurse can be installed via buildroot in menu Package Selection for the target -> Graphic libraries and applications (graphic/text) -> ncurse. Once compiled, simply copy libncurses.a and libncurses.so on your /usr/lib/ target rootfs directory.

 buildroot/project_build_arm/armadeus/root/usr/lib/libncurses.a
 buildroot/project_build_arm/armadeus/root/usr/lib/libncurses.so
 buildroot/project_build_arm/armadeus/root/usr/lib/libncurses.so.5

Compiling

The first problem is to know how cross-compile vim on x86 platform for arm platform.

Some host packets are necessary to compile it :

sudo apt-get install libncursesw5-dev

There is a mail to explain how to do that here [2], I'm reading it and I will try this. According to the documentation I compiled with these options :

ac_cv_sizeof_int=4 \
vim_cv_getcwd_broken=no \
vim_cv_memmove_handles_overlap=yes \
vim_cv_stat_ignores_slash=yes \
vim_cv_tgetent=zero \
vim_cv_terminfo=yes \
vim_cv_toupper_broken=no \
vim_cv_tty_group=world \
./configure \
        --build=i586-linux \
        --host=arm-linux \
        --target=arm-linux \
        --with-tlib=ncurses

Don't forget to set your arm-linux-gcc path before, personally, I set it in my ~/.bashrc

export PATH=$PATH:~/armadeus/buildroot/build_arm/staging_dir/usr/bin/

And I make:

make

Once compiled, I tried to launch it via serial debug on nfs partition:

# cd /mnt/host/vim72/src
# ./vim
E437: terminal capability "cm" required
Press ENTER or type command to continue

But it seem to has some problems on serial debug, but throught ssh that work !

Launch it

With last version of armadeus (v3 rev940) that work well via nfs with :

/mnt/host/vim72/src/vim /etc/fstab

TODO

• Try to use it throught serial debug Done
• reduce size in minimum
• Use color
• Configure the strange behaviour with serial debug
• Make a buildroot package